Tough Times

Palk
was now a reader. And not just any reader. Two
years ago, at
eighteen, he had become the youngest initiate to start the difficult
study of the ancient scripts. Just one year later he had
volunteered
for duty among the ghosts, and had been accepted. Within six
months he
had found and brought back his first relic. The thin, frail
paper of
those days, soaked in floods, chewed around the edges, but still
legible, traced the fall of a meteor in a snowbound wasteland.

His father shook his head and muttered that no one had ever survived
a winter by reading, but Palk didn't care. He was young and
impractical and full of large ideas. The very next day he sneaked off
to the city again.

Palk's zeal couldn't stop him from being cold to the bone.
After a good sixth of the day spent rowing, and then walking through
huge, weed-filled streets, now he sat on his creaky stool in front of
the old, rusted table in one of the buildings of books. Great ruined
gaps in the ancient structure's thick stone walls let in light for him
to see by, but they also let in whistling wind and dry, rattling
leaves. Ghosts whispered in every corner where he wasn't looking. He
pulled his leather cloak more tightly over his knitted shirt, and
curled his toes inside his straw-filled clogs. He thought of what his
father was going to do when he returned home with paper instead of
turnips.

In front of him, carefully spread out, lay a fragile printed document,
the color in the pictures still detectable after three hundred years.
He scowled at one picture in particular, of a happy group climbing some
structure, wearing the impossibly thin and elegant shoes of the day. They obviously didn't have to stuff their shoes with any itchy straw.

Pulling himself back to his task, he quoted the priests' saying,
'Hatred reduces knowledge. Knowledge reduces hatred.' Only wiser
heads than his could decide why brainless, careless butterflies were
privileged to live in the Age of the Gods, while he suffered cold, and
hunger, and hard labor. But unbidden thoughts tugged the corners of
his mouth up: the flutterheads and their good shoes were all long dead,
and the peasants had survived.

He looked carefully all over the page before turning it. Nothing there
about about comets or meteors, or, the new word he had recently
learned, asteroids. Then on to the next page. The light faded
imperceptibly as the sun slid past noon, yet Palk looked out through
the gaps and noted it. He had to be sure to leave himself enough
daylight. Just because, as a reader, he was on speaking terms with the
ghosts, didn't mean he wanted to be at their mercy when they walked.

On the tenth page he finally found something of interest. "Perseid
storm the best ever!" Most readers would have missed it, since the
important key words everyone searched for were omitted, but this was
precisely why Palk was so good. His mind made connections, and kept
them, and from somewhere he recalled that certain meteors had been
called 'Perseid' in those far off times. Carefully he removed the
page, and noted that the writing was to be continued in the next
issue. He went back to get it, but, plague and triple-plague, there
was that cryptic sign again: "Further issues stored online." He had to
admit there were parts of the huge building where even he was afraid to
go, but he had looked almost everwhere, and never found anything
labelled "online."

Reciting another of the priests' homilies, "Do what you can, forget
what you can't," he returned to studying the pages. It was almost time
to leave when his eye fell on a small boxed item.

"Near Earth Asteroid Survey Cancelled. Ten million dollars to continue
mapping the orbits of earth-crossing asteroids was cut today in the
final House-Senate conference on next year's budget. Lieutenant Garcia
of Space Command testified that altering asteroid orbits was feasible
if they were known far enough in advance. However, Congressperson
Wokes, Head of the Appropriations Committee, noted that times were
tough, and that the Committee had to make difficult choices, allocating
taxpayer money to projects of the most practical benefit to all."

The wind whistled through the huge dead rooms. Palk stared at the
page, unseeing. Finally, he noticed the dimming light and jumped up
with a start. Carefully he took the page, and cautiously picked his
way through the rubble out to the open. The wind caught his cloak and
his hair.

Few people counted much beyond a hundred in Palk's day. He wasn't
quite sure how much "ten million" was. Maybe, he thought, as he
flitted down the broken street to his boat, it was more money than
there was in all the world?